Spoiler alert: If you’re spending Christmas in Prague and are reading this in December without a reservation for Christmas Eve dinner, you’re already screwed. Panic and/or stock up now.
Prague dining used to be so easy. When we started our Prague food tours back in 2011, we could make reservations for a tour hours before, and restaurants would have a table. While this all has changed and now you need to book sometimes well in advance for the popular restaurants and hours in Prague, even back then there was one exception: Christmas and NYE. That is why, from the very outset of this blog, we have been compiling an annual overview of Prague Christmas and NYE dining options, and this is the 2019 edition.
Just so that you understand: Christmas Eve is the biggest holiday of the year, and everything halts to a standstill in the early afternoon, as families get together to prepare the Christmas Eve dinner, lay down the fruits of their last weeks’ labor over Christmas cookies (yes, they take weeks to make and seconds to eat), enjoy the Christmas cheer and, if parents or in-laws from the countryside are involved, inevitably fight over politics. But the gist is: everything shuts down in the afternoon of December 24 and you should act now if you want to eat out, because the good dining options are limited and far apart, since most Czechs stay at home to cook and eat a traditional meal. What is the traditional meal? Escargots outside during the day, followed by fried carp fillet schnitzels with potato salad, fish soup, sometimes barley risotto with mushrooms or sauerkraut soup. (There are regional and family differences, obviously.)
Also, a small aside: if you are visiting Prague during the holidays, you should know that by law, any shops with footprint larger than 200 square meters must shut down for bank holidays, meaning that if you want to shop for food - or anything else - on December 25 and 26 and January 1, your options will be really limited to the convenience stores around town. If you plan to do any shopping during the holidays, please plan ahead.
As for NYE, options are quite plentiful, but you still may need some help with navigating the landscape. Most restaurants offer a set menu that will include a specific sequence of dishes or, more frequently, some sort of buffet situation, with or without wine pairing, and usually some sparkling wine. Now, these set menus can be pretty expensive (Field, a Michelin-star restaurant, offers a 6-course dinner with wine pairing for a whooping CZK 13,000, the equivalent of about 500 EUR), but we think the more important decision is where and how you want to spend your NYE in Prague. The street celebrations, especially around the Charles Bridge and the big squares (Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square) can be notoriously noisy and uninhibited, so we think the most important NYE decision is really how near or far you want to be from all that.
So without further ado, here’s our 2019 Prague Christmas and NYE Dining Guide. No matter when you are reading this, you should drop everything and act now. Don’t call us on the 23rd, panicking what to do. If you happen to be there, we have two words for you: hotel restaurants. And we really dislike most hotel restaurants.
Technical notes
This year, we have summarized our findings in the handy table below. Kind of a cheat sheet, if you will. You can download it below, too. This is a selection of the venues we like and we have reached out to and got a response. These are ordered in no particular order. (Except the restaurants, with the Michelin stars first, followed by the Bib Gourmands. Then it’s whatever came in first.) „Open“ means the venue will be open without any changes to the regular opening hours or menu - just business as usual. We will be updating the table as more results come in.
Prague Christmas Dining: Prague food tours
So, first the good news. We run our Prague Foodie Tour throughout the holidays, with the exception of December 24 for, well, obvious reasons. Work/life balance and Christmas cheer. No, really, there’s simply nowhere to go. Bummer. But December 25 and 26 are a go, as well as New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. So let us know and we’l fix you with a great food tour.
Prague Christmas Dining: Restaurants
On the restaurant front, everything’s fairly fine until the 23rd, and then it goes quickly downhill after that. These restaurants will shut down for the entire holidays: Kastrol, Sansho, QQ Asian Kitchen, and Bockem, the fairly new set-menu breakfast place.
Most restaurants will shut down for Christmas Eve (which is, famously, the only day when virtually the entire Ambiente restaurant group, which runs the Lokal pubs, La Degustation, Café Savoy and many other eateries, shuts down), with these notable exceptions: well, the entire La Collezione group (the Bottega bistros, along with Aromi and Cucina di Finestra restaurants), just like every year, stays open, mostly with set menus. Only Bottega di Finestra and Bottega Linka seem to have a la carte menus; Aromi seems to let you choose between set menu and a la carte.
Other good options for Christmas Eve are rare and far apart: The Eatery’s buffer is entirely sold out, except the communal table for groups of 8 to 10. They told us they will wait a bit and if it does not get sold, they will open it as a communal table for smaller groups eventually. Chef Pohlreich’s Café Imperial and Next Door will have an a la carte menu but if they’re not sold out by now, they soon will be. Aureole, a fancy Czech-Asian fusion place on the top of a high-rise building, will have an escargots menu during the day and Christmas set menu in the evening. U Bansethu and Wine Food Market will shut down at 4pm. And Vinohradsky Parlament will have Christmas specials throughout the holidays.
As for NYE, many restaurants will simply stay open as usual. Others opt for set menus, some prepaid, some not. These range from fairly inexpensive ones (Bottega Gastronomica’s very sensible CZK 1550 menu) to the aforementioned Field’s CZK 13000 meal (incl. wine pairing). Things will get back to normal on 1 December, with most Ambiente restaurant groups having lentil specials.
Prague Christmas Dining: Bars
If there is one think you can rely on, year after year, is that you can drink those disappointing gifts and family fights over politics or your new girl/boyfriend in a few of our favorite cocktail bars in Prague. Christmas Eve bar crawl, anyone? Our favorite, Parlour, will be open again on Christmas Eve, and we will let you know that we did used to finish our Christmas Eves under the comforting oversight of Parlour’s bartenders nearly every day before becoming parents. Banker’s Bar will open a tiny bit later than usual. L’Fleur, with their great selection of Champagnes, will open at 9pm, and Anonymous Shrink’s Office, the fun speakeasy with a Freudian twist, opens at 9:30pm. Bonvivant’s will be open during the day, so if you can’t get through the Christmas Eve sober, head over there for drinks and… lobster? While Hemingway Bar and Bugsy’s will stay closed on Christmas Eve, they will, just like all our favorite cocktail bars in Prague, reopen for Christmas Day as usual.
Quite as you would expect, all the bars will stay open for NYE. Hemingway Bar is selling tickets for their NYE at CZK 990 per person, which includes a guaranteed seat, some tapas and a glass of sparkling. All other bars we have asked will be open for NYE but don’t plan any special menus or arrangements.
Things will get tougher for all the winos planning the spend Christmas in Prague, as virtually all our favorite wine bars will shut down for 24 and 25 December, with only Bokovka and the small Vinograf in Misenska to reopen for the 26th. Again, if you need wine to survive the holidays (and we feel ya), head over to your favorite wine bar to make an early purchase beforehand.
Prague Christmas Dining: Coffee
We understand. You’ll need some caffeine in your veins otherwise you will not make it through Christmas. We know how that feels. We will all be fine up until December 23, but then things will get tough. Only a few shops will stay open on the 24th, with limited hours: Kafemat until 3pm, onesip coffee until a very cruel 12pm, coffee room „in the morning“, and Alza café will sell coffee to the desperate last-minute shoppers until 12pm. (See you in the line!) And then it’s only EMA Espresso Bar and their sister Alf&Bet until 4pm.
For the 25th and 26th, well, stock up on your beans or fancy compostable Nespresso-compatible pods, because virtually all good coffee shops in Prague will shut down for Christmas, only to reopen to huge lines of angry customers on the 27th. Nearly all good coffee shops we asked will be open on NYE and NYD, some at weekend opening hours.